Sun said on Friday it might sue rival Microsoft, since it believed an anti-trust settlement between the federal government and the software maker would not protect competitors.
"It is not even weak. It is totally ineffectual," Sun"s top lawyer, General Counsel Mike Morris said of the settlement. "There are all sorts of outs and loopholes and vagaries and lack of definitions here."
The deal, which must be endorsed by a federal judge, intends to curb Microsoft"s powers by setting restrictions on how it treats competitors, and it avoids the breakup a court once recommended.
Microsoft has stopped short of admitting it broke the law but said on Friday the deal gave it new responsibilities.
Sun had been waiting to see if the courts would check Microsoft, Morris said. "We wanted to see how all this panned out, but now we know."
"Microsoft"s conduct related to its Java developer tools served to protect its monopoly of the operating system in a manner not attributable either to the superiority of the operating system, or to the acumen of its makers, and therefore was anti-competitive," the court wrote.
"We"ve never been about hurting Microsoft," Morris said.